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Three Vital Considerations For Your Plastic Product

Here at Excelsior, we take great pride in our ability to create bespoke plastic products for our customers using our roto-moulding process, often working to specific plastic manufacturing briefs to create products that suit our customers’ needs exactly. If you’re thinking about how to bring your own plastic product idea to life, this week on the blog we’re taking a brief look at a couple of things you’ll certainly want to think about first. They’re far from the only ones, but certainly amongst the most important!

The three considerations we’re covering today are:

The product’s strength

Its impact resistance

The temperature applications

So, without further ado…

The Product’s Strength

Strength and impact resistance are two things that often get mixed up, even by professionals within the plastic manufacturing industry. Essentially, a product’s strength refers to how well it reacts to weight and gradual strain. It’s defined by: “the amount of strain stored by the product up to the moment of fracture”. Our safety steps, for example, need to be able to take the weight of a full-grown adult. If it cracked under that weight (basically, if it wasn’t sufficiently strong), it would obviously be unfit for purpose.

The strength of a product can vary in importance, depending on its intended application, but for safety products it obviously needs to be up to a very clearly-defined minimum standard. Something with a low strength wouldn’t be suitable for a safety product, which is why here at Excelsior we use High Density Polyethylene, to guarantee that our products are up to scratch.

Impact Resistance

Although strength and impact resistance aren’t exactly the same aspect, they are related – lack of strength and toughness is a major factor that can reduce the impact resistance of reinforced plastics. Impact resistance is exactly what it sounds like; how well the product holds up to sudden or repeated cracks or bumps against its surface. In high-traffic areas (like warehouses for example), a product needs to have a relatively high impact resistance in order to last for any reasonable length of time, as these are the sorts of environments where it might be subjected to the greatest volumes of repeated physical blows. Traffic cones are a great example of a product with a typically high impact resistance – and most children’s toys have to be hardy enough to withstand often careless treatment by their owners.

Temperature Applications

At first glance this might not seem like such a major concern, but it can trip people up more often than you might think! Heat doesn’t have to be furnace-level to start having an visible effect on the function and aesthetics of some products – just constant exposure or contact with a hot surface (like a machine’s outer wall) can be enough to warp certain types of plastic. Meanwhile at the opposite end of the spectrum, excessively cold temperatures can cause plastic materials to become brittle and crack.

The plastic materials we use here at Excelsior tend to be pretty hardy against varying temperature extremes, but if you’re ever in doubt, don’t hesitate to ask us here at Excelsior. We have decades of success behind us in creating high-quality plastic products for our clients, using our roto moulding process.

You can read some of our case studies to find out more about how we’ve helped businesses just like yours, or give us a call on 0161 765 2010. We’re always eager to help!